[Nate] Silver's getting a lot of credit for calling Obama's victory when basically any statistician or political scientist who's been following the race made the exact same call — and in fact, some of those statisticians and political scientists have criticized Silver's model for being opaque and overcomplicated.

And it's very easy to miss the forest for the trees, and lionize Silver the individual writer instead of a broad push for data-driven analysis in political journalism. After Silver's great showing on Tuesday, it'd be easy for political horserace journalists to co-opt him and treat him as a unique oracle, instead of understanding that it's the statistical approach that made him — and Linzer, Wang, Simon Jackman, Mark Blumenthal and others — handicap the election so perfectly.

It has often been the case that significant political changes can only occur when a President plays against type. So only Nixon could go to China and only George Bush (41) could sign the 1990 Clean Air Act (the largest and most costly environmental statute ever enacted. Perhaps, by the same token, only a Democratic president could legitimize (and in some cases expand) the aggressive anti-terror policies of the Bush (43) Administration, as Obama has done.

Now American politics has an entrenched coalition of religious or religious-seeming largely white people, with a small pocket of well-off funders and bundlers who actually benefit from Republican financial ideas, as oppose to the poor whites who imagine they will benefit from those ideas—and there's mostly the rest of us.

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